All posts by temp8161

Yesterday, on Skype, Dave told me that he knows tons of guys in San Francisco who make games and they all want to make real narrative movies, not games. “It’s just the way it is here,” he said, “tons of them making games and they all want to make movies.”

Dave works at Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley and moonlights teaching a class on Avid at Art Academy University in San Francisco (AAU) where I’m working on an MFA in music for visual media. Dave and I were skyping about unpredictable behavior of the Avid program. I’ve decided that Avid is a hoax that targets nerds who want to make movies, it’s like one of those parasites that promotes its life cycle by programming the behavior of the hosts they infect with the result that they commit suicide. It makes zombies.

Gretchen Winkler, another AAU student also working on an MFA but in illustration, posted a lament on Facebook about the stereotyping of Germans, “as if we’re all Nazis”. I commented that it isn’t Germans but bureaucrats that organize mob behavior to carry out pogroms and German culture is quintessentially bureaucratic.

Last night, I watched John Huston’s screen adaptation of Carson McCuller’s “Reflections in a Golden Eye” after first disappointing myself watching the tragic acting performances of Clint Eastwood and two of his girl friends in a soft porn piece called, “Play Misty for Me”. Huston’s adaptation of McCuller’s book with Brando, Taylor, Harris, etc., disturbed my dreams and in the morning I beheld the context that cements Avid’s effect and Gretchen’s observations into an idea about the relevance of narratives, at least for a small fraction of the human population that reads books and likes Woody Allen’s films.

Everything about “Play Misty…” typifies pornography, a melodrama made for the box office: shallow story heavy on spectacle and everything about “Reflections…” evokes feelings that reveal the kind of confusion we suffer that leads us to become thoughtless bureaucrats. Eastwood’s shallow film tried for box office success playing on a stereotype of mental illness. Huston’s movie tells a story about the ubiquitously unbalanced mental state that suffuses all bureaucracies. McCuller’s story is a description in detail of the phenonmenon that psychologist Eric Fromm called, escape from freedom. Call it voluntary zombi-ism, Nazism, neo-conservatism, call it what you will.

Dave’s game-makers don’t aspire to make pornography in narrative form, they long to tell a relevant story. Like Eastwood when he made “Misty”, they may not know the distinction that divides kitsch from art. Though they can render a script and film a story, there is nothing in their experience nor education that might compel them to produce art while they live in a whirlpool of kitsch. Historically, good stories are uncommon. McCullers was in her teens when she wrote “The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter”, one of the most poignant, beautiful and powerful stories reflecting racism in America and anywhere.

In this nation of poor, blind fools led by rich, ruthless fools, we are under the illusion that “we” are white, Christian, western Europeans. Regardless of our own ethnic ancestry, we have always done our best to make the children of poorer immigrants regret their ethnic origin and exalted the foreign chíc of well-to-do newcomers to romantic excess.

At this moment, across the land and in media, we institutionally suppress expression of Spanish and Latin American native heritage and language. Descendants of these native Americans receive benefits for signing documents in which they describe themselves as “Latino” or “Hispanic” and then there are others we pay to call themselves, “Native American”, setting up another distinction in institutionalized discrimination.

Descendants of native Americans we call, "Latinos".

Public school policies in California demean Hispanic tradition and teachers of Spanish-speaking ESL students are generally ignorant of the wealth of world literature that has been written in Spanish. Children learn to be ashamed of their appearance and heritage.

Long before Miguel Cervantes invented the modern novel and well before Gutenberg invented miniature metal type, the syntax that underlies the Spanish language was born in Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Babylonia, all of which together contained more wisdom of life and nature than has been since scientifically discovered.

Sub-Americans, who make up 40% of our population (80% where I live), don’t know that our numeric and musical notation, mathematics and sciences of astronomy, physics, biology and chemistry incubated in their language as they were incorporated, for the benefit of commerce, into the Iberian peninsula’s spoken tradition that we call, Spanish, the written form of which was devised by Jews at the behest of the Iberian caliphates that governed Spain until they were driven away by tribes from the north, organized for the first time under the banner of Christianity by henchmen of Charlemagne’s dominion.

English is a wonderful language and my own. It amalgamated voices of Norsk sprog with Latin derivatives. Spanish, derived from Arabic, Latin, Persian, Greek and other sources is a more sonorous, sensual and emotionally expressive tongue. Castillian friars made the native Americans they enslaved learn Spanish for pragmatic reasons. They were not invited to explore Spanish literature–what good is a slave who thinks he is a human being? Here, in this town in California, where I live, 100,000 our of 130,000 citizens speak Spanish and wonderful works of Spanish literature gather dust on the shelves of libraries, ignored by those who still have the most to gain from them.

It’s easy to see why Martin Heidegger loved Adolph Hitler when you understand that racial genetic differences do include stereotypical traits when you take the Bell curve into account, which is just what an astute man like Martin would do. You can see genetic differences between people of the same culture, tribe, clan and family. Black people, generally, do have bigger dicks and yes, their skin has dark hue. Jews have small dicks and are good thinkers, Greeks are Jews who, like Arabs, use dicks as chairs. And so on. Naturally, a bunch of fanatic Jesuit Castillaños could enslave an entire continent of aboriginals, who lack the gene for common sense and the descendents of their combined progeny demonstrate that on the average, this genetic trait is both predominant and regressive.

Moral and ethical issues arise as much from ignoring these differences as they do from exploiting them. Ignoring them, you miss the implicit survival strategy these traits entail. The differences would not exist if each group had not employed them as a way to survive and it is revelatory to see how even traits like blind, stupid ignorance were genetically inscribed, which is, essentially what became, on average, of males of the human species.

What to do? What to do! You’d have to be blind, deaf and witless not to know what to do once you see this. The issue is not the differences but how you use the principle involved.